Stop business travel. Work in the cloud.

Shrinking T&E budgets. Tedious lines at airports. Unpleasant and unnecessary indignities thrust upon us by humorless TSA drones. Cattle-car cramming into the planes where service is reduced to a packet or pretzels and ice water. And now swine flu.

There's loads of good reasons not to travel for business. But until recently there has not been many good reasons to use collaboration software to supplant those face-to-face meetings.

However, one excellent alternative to travel is the Qwaq Forums, a service that creates a very life-like virtual meeting area in the cloud. It's an exciting, interactive working environment for groups.

Now in version 2.0, the service lets you drag and drop applications into panels on your desktop that can be used by other meeting participants logged on from elsewhere. For example, if you have a CAD drawing on your PC and want other engineers on your team to fiddle with your design, you need only grab the document, put into the panel and it goes live on everyone's screen in the meeting.

The service requires you to download a client-side tool to interact with the service in the cloud. Greg Nuyens, CEO of Qwaq Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., says, "We use the computer power at the edge of the network." That client side processing power gives Qwaq (pronounced quack) an impressive interactive response time.

"It eliminates most latency," he says.

The hybrid Qwaq Forums service costs $60 per month per user for scads of features. Among the of nifty things you can do is follow someone who's more adept using Qwaq to see how they get things done. You can hold a private conversation with other meeting attendees. Also, Qwaq has a meeting DVR feature that lets every action in the meeting be recorded for playback later. And, of course, you can have live video feeds, including yourself and other meeting goers.

According to Nuyens, as with any tool, users will need to work with Qwaq three or four times to become comfortable using the many features in the service. He claims once people become proficient with Qwaq, the value is not in the travel savings a company will pocket, but in the increased productivity of workers.

That may be true, but just not traveling will be enough reward for most of us.